[August 28, 2008]

Chordiant, IBM Renew Vows for Another Five Years

TMCnet Contributing Editor

Chordiant and IBM (News - Alert) officials say the two firms have expanded their alliance for an additional five years, "with particular focus on global healthcare, communications, and insurance markets." Chordiant (News - Alert) and IBM have completed implementations in North America and Europe.

Under the agreement, Chordiant can access the network of nearly 40 IBM Innovation Centers in new and emerging markets, such as Asia and Eastern Europe. The Chordiantes will be able to "work side by side with IBM sales, marketing, technical experts and engineers," company officials say.

"Businesses globally are spending considerable time and resources on new customer experience initiatives," said Mark Hanny, vice president of global ISV alliances, IBM. "IBM's strength in hardware, software, and services combines with Chordiant's expertise in decision-based front-office products for our chosen verticals."

Chordiant and IBM's SOA products are based on Chordiant's decision management products and multi-channel SOA platform, IBM WebSphere, DB2, Rational, and Lotus software, IBM hardware including System x and Power Systems servers, and systems integration expertise from IBM Global Business Services.

These software offerings are billed as providing clients with "a single, comprehensive view of their customer interactions across any number of call center agents or channels." The combined products also provide case management, along with "improved control over customer retention."

Last month Chordiant announced Recommendation Advisor 6.1, described by company officials as "a real-time conversation and interaction management product for organizations with high customer interaction volumes."

The product can "listen" to the conversation a call center or branch agent is having with a customer, and re-apply models and rules to every new input. It offers Next-Best-Action recommendations that change based on customer responses, action or inaction.

It also presents customers with personalized, Next-Best-Action-driven offers and recommendations in self-service channels.

"The impact of enterprise decision management on operations is only just beginning to be fully appreciated," says James Taylor, principal and co-founder of Smart Systems consulting firm.

It's built on Chordiant Decision Management, a suite of predictive and adaptive decisioning applications that lets business users develop Next-Best-Action strategies.

It uses models that predict and react to individual customer expectations, propensities and behaviors combined with business rules and segmentation schemes. This combination also forms "decision logic" that can be centrally deployed in the run-time environment for batch decisioning, real-time decisioning or both, across any channel.

Basically, the product assesses everything known about and said by the customer in current and previous interactions and recommends Next-Best-Actions to be taken. These actions can take the form of personalized offers or bundles, advice, questions, compensation or whatever. "At no point during the contact are recommendations or actions scripted," company officials say, adding that instead, it "guides the conversation, determining and adapting actions in real-time based on customer responses."

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